Religions and their histories: the fate of violence or a peace outlook?

Frequently, if not always, we look for violence’s explanations within our past. The history of relationships between world religions is packed with conflicts, and that is undoubtedly a strong contradiction with the love and peace values they all share. In fact, the affirmation of God’s uniqueness and universal truth within the three monotheistic religions is, for many people, incompatible with the concept of religions as supranational peace guarantor, forgetting that, besides an alleged “criminal history” (as narrated by Daschner in the context of Christianity), religions, as authentic manifestations of the universal “theological experience” among all people and cultures in history, also feature a positive cultural and moral strength.

While widely accepted, this opinion on religions reveals itself very shallow, especially towards monotheistic religions. In fact, it is exactly in those saints and mystics, who are deeply in contact with the absolute universe, that is possible to observe the purest forms of openness towards different religious and spiritual experiences, which are often very far apart between them, if not completely incompatible. An aspect that could lead to the recognition of the religious experience as the deepest and purest form of the human being: exactly by going through the history of religious experiences, within every religion, especially the monotheistic ones, which enclose enormous potential in terms of dialogue and mutual acknowledgment, without requiring sacrificing its authenticity, and the absoluteness of its experience.

The evening conference will offer three different perspectives related to the subject.

Professor Savignano will introduce Xavier Zubiri, a contemporary Spanish intellectual who philosophically inquired into the aforementioned positive idea enclosed within all religions history. Later, Professor Krienke and Professor Diez will close the conference by outlining, respectively, the perspective from a Christian and a Muslim point of view.